“We are radiotropes. Just as other lifeforms orientate themselves
in response to the sun’s radiation, many contemporary human
behaviours are shaped by electromagnetic landscapes and signal topographies.

[…]

Open Flame is a router paired with a candle. To bring up this
network the candle must be lit and when it is blown out, the
network disappears.

[…]

These devices are examples of eccentric engineering. Eccentric
engineering asks questions of how we design the everyday
technologies that sustain us. It is a provocation for thinking
about infrastructures as negotiations with non-human organisms
and systems, rather than as exclusively human services.”

“[E]xpanding on the ideas of the current system of a true free-hand
library: The shelf-scanning robot allows you to reorganise the books
without losing their positions; the original table lets you pin down
a collection of books and materials as a collection, and save it as
a reading list for others to find.”

“Focus effects are the crux of what makes tvOS communal. Focus
effects provide visual feedback not only to whomever is
quarterbacking the remote, but also to any onlookers who are
following along. They’re what separate this native TV experience
from AirPlay-ing your iPad to the big screen.”

“It works like this: when a window gets dragged offscreen,
the controls on the toolbar will shift to fill any remaining
space in order to stay visible. This means that important
controls like the window close button will remain accessible
at all times.”

Minimal todo list iPhone app “almost entirely controlled
by gestures”. I use it every day. UI takes a few minutes to
get used to, but after that it doesn’t get in the way much…
Learning which swipe means “check” and which means “delete”
took me about three days, though.

“I now have a dozen little scripts that do nifty things with mail.
[…] And every time I write one, I feel like a genius. The whole
system just delights me. I want everything in my life to work like
this program.”

“Always consider the implicit capabilities of the unimpaired
user, and take steps to even the playing field. That’s what
accessibility means. Not special treatment, but tailored access
to the same treatment.”

“I anticipated a weird and slightly arduous journey, especially
when it came to using the keyboard. To my great surprise, I picked
it up immediately. Within 30 seconds, I checked the weather. Next,
I read some stock prices. Amazingly, it even renders stock charts,
something the blind have never had access to.”

“If I have to write one more polyglot bash / awk / python script to
gather data from log files on a bunch of different machines, demux
that into a time-ordered event stream, pipe it through something to
munge it into some slightly different format, ship that off via post
to some web address and get some JSON back, parse that into some
other shit, do some computation over it like aggregation or date math
over time stamps with unlike representations, wrap the results up in
an HTML table and send that table in a MIME-enabled e-mail to myself
I think I am going to explode.”